Roya Pakzad is the founder and director of Taraaz, a research and advocacy organization working at the intersection of technology and human rights. She is also an affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab. Her work centers on researching human rights implications of digital technologies, corporate accountability, and human rights-centered design. Roya holds degrees from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran (B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering), the University of Southern California (M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering) and Columbia University (M.A. in Human Rights Studies). She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Santa Cruz, California.